I try to change companies to be less about ads and more about acts. Through inspiration. Through strategy. Through coaching. And mainly blood, sweat and tears. Because in these times, brands aren't defined by what they say, but what they do. Not convinced? Let my acts speak for themselves.

Create momentum

Most organisation adopt an oiltanker-approach when it comes to social media: big strategies, big projects, big promises, big investments. But doomed to hit a big iceberg. Rather than failing big, create small wins to create momentum within the organisation.

Creating momentum is about two things:1) Defining the right strategic vectors; define 3-5 main strategic projects that help you decide on which projects to pursue. E.g. a strategic project ‘conversion’ will challenge you to define multiple smaller projects to learn what drives sales and conversion within social. A strategic project ‘sensibilisation’ makes you pursue pilots that help employees learn and use social.2) Adopting a speedboat-approach; small, agile teams that do small, controlled pilot projects designed to learn and create small wins.

Example: KLM onboard service evolution

It’s relatively easy to set up a social media campaign, a content calendar or a web relations team. But really integrating social in the DNA of your organisation might be a bit more difficult.

One of KLM’s strategic vectors was integration of social throughout the organisation, to be more precise: integrating social onboard. KLM adopted a phased approach to implement social media inflight, with the stewards and stewardesses we all know.The first phase were the campaigns KLM Surprise and KLM Live Reply that generated buzz and awareness amongst staff that there was such thing as social media.The second phase was solidifying social service. Every time you have a complaint (or compliment) for the staff via twitter or facebook, it will be redirected via email to the staff of that specific airplane. Another small spark that made employees realize the impact of social.The third phase consisted of KLM’s Meet & Seat project (choose your seatmate based on their Facebook or LinkedIn profile) and the iPad on board project, that let staff on specific flights get used to iPads and direct connections to the web relations team.
All phases to prime the organisation for more cool social stuff to come. Can you guess what’s next? :)